


water in the lungs

by rosecake



Category: Bloodline (TV 2015)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Hallucinations, Incest, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 09:22:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20654891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/pseuds/rosecake
Summary: Danny leaves Islamorada the first chance he gets.





	water in the lungs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).

Danny leaves Islamorada the first chance he gets. He moves into the cheapest place he can find in Miami, a fucking dumpster that looks and smells like it hasn’t been cleaned since the day it was built back in the sixties, and when he tells the landlord he should be arrested for trying to pawn it off as a livable apartment the guy just laughs and tells him the rent’s due twice a month.

It’s still better than Islamorada. It doesn’t matter how big a fucking deal his father is down there, less than two hours away in Miami and nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s not Danny Rayburn here. He’s just Danny. A nobody with an apartment far enough from the shore that he doesn’t ever have to look at the ocean.

It should be easy to move on with his life. It would be easy, except that every time he moves wrong his shoulder burns and he’s reminded, in vivid detail, of the day his sister died.

His dad made sure he’ll never be able to forget.

——

She’s always with him. Always, even though a small, selfish part of him would rather forget her. It’s impossible, though - he’s reminded of her every time the wind blows the wrong way and he catches the scent of the ocean breeze, every time he looks up at a cloudless sky and sees the infinite blue of the sea in it. Every time his shoulder aches, and that’s every day.

She’s always there but he doesn’t actually _see_ her until a couple of months after he’s moved on from weed to percocets and coke.

He’s lying in bed, his heart pounding, body drenched in sweat even though it’s a colder than average February and he’s go the window open. Her dark hair flutters slightly in the breeze as she leans on the windowsill, and he doesn’t remember having a girl over but it wouldn’t be the first time he’s come to with a stranger in his apartment. Maybe she’ll call an ambulance for him. He's pretty sure he's too fucked up to do it himself.

“I can’t call anyone for you,” she says. She turns to look at him and he can see her face, young and dark and deeply out of place in his shithole apartment, and there’s a strange feeling of familiarity that still doesn’t fully click into place for him until the moonlight glances off her necklace. “If you want help you’ve got to ask for it yourself.”

“Sarah,” he says. He says her name over and over again until he’s hoarse, as if repetition will make everything make sense. “Am I dead?”

“No,” she says. “Not yet. Do you want to be dead?”

“I don’t—“ he says, and his heart is beating too fast and too hard, so hard it feels like it might burst. He’s thought about taking everything he had at once before, basically every time he opens the pill bottle, really, but he only took a couple this time and only because his shoulder was fucking killing him. He can’t feel his shoulder now, but he can’t really feel the rest of his extremities either, and there’s a rush of panic at the realization that makes his heart rate rise. He’s not sure how much faster it can get before he dies.

“I don’t know,” he says. He’s so tired of everything but he still doesn’t want his fucking heart to explode. He’s not even twenty yet. “I miss you.”

“Why?” she asks, smiling. “I didn’t go anywhere.” 

——

He gets older and she gets older too, always five years younger than him, no more and no less. He’s not sure why - if he’s going to be haunted surely it makes more sense for her to be younger, to be the age she was when she died.

“Is it the drugs?” he asks. As far as he knows nothing he’s into should cause semi-permanent hallucinations, but then again he can’t really be sure what all he’s taken over the years. “Or was I just fucked to start with?”

She shrugs. “Who knows?”

——

Once, he accidentally gets himself so fucked up he forgets she isn’t real, and then after that it’s hard not to do it on purpose.

——

He comes back home for the holidays, half because he’s skipped the last few and he knows his mom is upset about it and half because his girlfriend threw him out and he can’t afford anyplace else to stay yet. He has to ask his mom for money for the bus ticket, and lies to her about how much it costs so he’ll have enough to buy something at the bus station. He feels bad about it, but there’s no way in hell he’s going to make it though a family holiday sober.

It’s only home, surrounded by the photos and memories, that he realizes how fucked things have gotten in his head. Her hair’s too dark, her skin’s too pale. She wouldn’t look like this if she were still alive. She’d look more like Meg or Diana - tan skin, light brown hair sunbleached even lighter. She'd look _alive. _

They lie together on his childhood bed and he can hear the sounds of the rest of his family downstairs, still awake and still laughing and talking together. He’d begged off early, said he was tired from he trip.

Sometimes he can’t fucking stand being around other people, but he’s always hated being alone, too. Maybe that’s why he can’t stop seeing her.

“You could go downstairs if you wanted,” she says.

Her eyes are always bright, even in dark rooms. “I don’t want to,” he says, and being here reminds him that there’s a lot more wrong than just the way she looks. It’s that she’s here with him at all. “If you were alive you’d be down there with them,” he says. “You wouldn’t be with me.”

She sighs and shifts on the bed, finding a more comfortable position, and it makes the sleeve of the dark blue coverup she’s wearing slip further down her arm. It’s only just barely long enough to cover her swimsuit bottoms, and he can see the pale expanse of her shoulder, the uncovered curve of her thigh. She’s so beautiful and he’s so lonely and all he can think about is how nothing in the world is ever fair. At least not in this family.

She’s beautiful and she could have had so much if she’d lived. She’d died, though, so she’s stuck with Danny.

“You would have hated me just as much as the rest of them,” he says.

“That’s not true,” she says, and he doesn’t believe her. He wants to kiss her and he’s afraid that if he tries she’ll disappear, so he stays motionless, lying right next to her but not quite touching her. “We were always so close. Don’t you remember?”

They were close. She was always his favorite. But she was always dad’s favorite, too, and she would have stayed with him, she would have -

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m here with you now, aren’t I? That should be enough.”

——

He takes the boat out late, after everyone else is sound asleep, and it’s dark and he’s fucking trashed but none of that matters. He could find the spot where she drowned in his sleep.

He drops the anchor and then dives into the water, so clear he can see straight through it even in the moonlight. It's not very deep here. He dives for the bottom again and again, even after his lungs start to burn, because he’s a grown man and knows he can manage depths like this better than a ten year old girl could. When he was younger he could hold his breath for ages, but that was before all the cigarettes. 

A wave of deja vu hits him as he scours along the sand, like he’s done this before and forgotten, or just dreamed about it so often it makes no difference in his memory. He can find the rocks but he can’t find the necklace.

Eventually he gives up. She’s waiting for him as he climbs back on the boat, and she doesn’t say anything as he heads back to the pier.

He doesn’t know what he would have done if he’d found her necklace down there in the water. She’s already got one hanging around her neck. 

——

He meets a girl and she’s nice and the relationship goes so well that he can only stand it for a few months before he goes and blows it up so he can be alone again. Just him and his sister. 

“That wasn’t smart,” she says. “Do you just not want to be happy?”

“I want to be happy,” he says. He does. He’s just not sure what it will take.

She’s leaning against the wall, so close that that he can’t resist the urge to reach out and touch her. He runs his fingers through her dark hair and along the soft skin of her face, over her cheeks and her lips, and she doesn't pull away. She doesn't vanish. 

“Do you think this will make you feel better?” she asks, her lips moving under his fingers as she speaks.

“Yes,” he says, and he presses his mouth to hers, hesitantly. He hasn't kissed a girl so chastely since he was a child. “I want to hold someone. I want to hold you.”

“Are you sure?”

He steps closer, and he can feel her breasts pressing against his chest, can feel the subtle movement of her hips as she shifts, spreading her legs slightly wider. It's pathetic just how fucking badly he needs her. Wants her, more than any other woman he's ever seen or spoken to or fucked, even though she's his sister. He loves her so much and that doesn't make him want to fuck her any less, even though it should. 

It's bad, but then again it's not like he hasn't already done far worse to her out of love. 

“Please,” he says. He pushes his hips against her, hard and desperate. "Please stay with me." 

“Don't worry,” she says, and she wraps her arms around him. "I'll stay with you as long as you want." 

In the morning he only half remembers what happened.

——

“You shouldn't do that,” she says as he swallows the pills.

“It’s fine,” says Danny. He waves the bottle at her. “I’ve got a prescription. Doctor’s orders.”

He’s got a doctor in Coral Gables now who’ll prescribe him anything he wants so long as he’s got the cash to cover it. It’s expensive, but even as city the size of Miami only has so many ERs. They’ve all started to recognize him.

“You got a prescription for LSD?”

He did not. The LSD he got that from the shady motherfucker the lady three apartments down is dating, and if he were in a better state of mind he’d be apprehensive about what it might be laced with. Right now he doesn’t really give a shit. There's an invitation from his mother on the counter, printed on heavy cream paper he's sure she spent ages picking out, along with a handwritten note letting him know that she tried to call but his phone's disconnected. 

He'll have to call her back before John sends a cop looking for him, but right now he can't fucking think about it. 

“One vice at a time, Danny. You’re going fuck yourself up.”

“Oh, I already did that a while ago,” he says. At worst he'll accidentally kill himself, and that'd be an improvement on the current situation. He's well and truly fucked, and right now his only goal is to make things just a little bit worse. Bad enough that he can forget that the one person that cares about him is a fucking delusion. 

He lets the tab dissolve on his tongue and she sighs as he washes it down with a splash of tequila.   
  
Danny falls back on the bed and she follows him, climbing on top of him, and the acid hasn't had nearly enough time to kick in yet but she's still warm and heavy. He rocks against her a few times, and then tell her, "I want to be inside you." 

"Be patient," she says, pulling her sundress off over her head.

She isn't wearing anything underneath it. Just her necklace, the gold seahorse resting against the pale skin of her chest. He's staring at it as she drags his underwear down, freeing his cock, and then his mind goes completely white when she lifts herself up and pushes him inside her. 

"Fuck," he says, and he wishes he could stay in this moment forever, his mind blissfully blank as he's buried in her. He thrusts up into her and she moans, happy, and he almost loses it. She's impossibly wet and warm and tight around him, her thighs shaking as she urges him to fuck her faster, harder. 

The rest of his life might be a disaster but he can at least still make his little sister happy. 

Sarah leans down to kiss him, her mouth open and hungry, and she tastes like salt. Just like ocean water. Something catches in his throat and he coughs against her but she doesn’t stop kissing him, her warm, wet mouth just like the sea.

The kiss reminds of him of when he was young, of the time he'd walked out into the ocean at night. He'd swum out until the water was good and deep and then he'd ducked his head beneath the waves and forced himself to inhale. The salt water had burned his lungs, and he'd only managed to keep himself submerged for a few seconds. Then he'd hit the surface, coughing and sputtering, and miserably made his way back to shore. He didn't have it in him to drown himself. 

He feels like he's drowning now, but it's easier this time. Pleasant. Maybe he just needed someone to help keep his head under water. 

——

“They don’t understand,” he says. All his problems are stacking up on each other and he needs to get his head clear, needs to figure shit out, but it’s late and he’s lying in the guest room of his childhood home and it’s been almost thirty fucking years since he left but nothing’s really changed. His dad is dead and still nothing’s fucking changed. “They don’t even realize you’re still here.”

Sarah slides on top of him, her body pressing into him, her weight the only thing keeping him from getting out of bed and pacing. “You could explain.”

He’s explained, again and again, and they still - they still would rather have their father back than have Danny there. Every single one of them. His fingers dig into her hips, and he's sure he's being too rough but she doesn't complain. “They don’t want to understand.”

“That’s okay,” she says. They’re both naked and he rocks up against her, desperate to feel her. To feel anything besides the anger. She presses her mouth to his shoulder, running her tongue over the skin and he feels it burn deep in the bone. “You can make them understand.”

He’s never sure what her goal is. To encourage him to do better, to encourage him to be worse. “I miss you,” he says, looping his arms around her waist, holding her tightly. “I just want to be with you.”

“I know,” she says, and he can hear the gentle lapping of waves in her voice. “Soon.”


End file.
